Los amantes de Teruel by Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

The first act takes place in the Moorish palace of Valencia. Juan Diego Marsilla, a knight from Teruel, wakes from a sleeping draught after his imprisonment in a dungeon. Zulima, the Moorish king’s wife, has fallen in love with him and arranged his escape. Marsilla tells her his story: he has loved Isabel de Segura since childhood and, because he was poor, her father gave him a deadline to gather an honest fortune; he fought at Las Navas de Tolosa, inherited a fortune in Syria and, on his way home, was captured by a Moorish pirate. When Zulima offers him her hand, he answers that his heart “es sólo para Isabel de Segura” (“belongs to Isabel de Segura alone”).

Spurned, Zulima swears revenge, and Marsilla takes up a sword to defend the king of Valencia from a plot he uncovered from his cell. Meanwhile, in Teruel, Don Pedro de Segura returns from Monzón with Don Rodrigo de Azagra, the wealthy suitor to whom he has promised his daughter: if Marsilla does not appear within three days, the wedding will go ahead. Isabel has not smiled in six years, and her mother, Doña Margarita, who has lived for fifteen years on penance and charity, keeps a secret that Azagra knows.

Azagra holds some letters that compromise Doña Margarita and uses them to make sure of the marriage. Then Zulima herself arrives at the house disguised as a young man, hints to Isabel that Marsilla forgot her for the sultana, and lets her believe he is dead. To save her mother’s name, Isabel agrees to marry. The deadline expires with the bell for vespers, the hour at which Marsilla left one Sunday six years before, and the play turns on those last hours: a wounded man who cannot come round, bandits on the road, and a church bell.

Hartzenbusch took a Teruel legend already brought to the stage by Tirso de Molina and Juan Pérez de Montalbán, among others, and turned it into a drama of Spanish Romanticism: love stronger than anything, a father’s word of honour that sacrifices his child, a fate that arrives a minute too late, and death as the only possible union. It opened in Madrid in 1837 to enormous success, and he revised it several times; in his definitive version, of 1849, he cut it from five acts to four.

Verse carries the moments of passion, with some scenes in prose, and some lines are still remembered, such as the vow with which Isabel saw Diego off: “Tuya o muerta” (“Yours, or dead”). The legend lives on in Teruel: the lovers’ mausoleum stands in the church of San Pedro, whose bells ring for vespers in the play, and since 1996 the city has held a re-enactment, “Las Bodas de Isabel de Segura” (Isabel de Segura’s Wedding).

Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch was born in Madrid on 6 September 1806 and died there on 2 August 1880. The son of a German cabinetmaker, he worked as a cabinetmaker and as a shorthand writer before The Lovers of Teruel established him as one of the great authors of Spanish Romantic drama.

He also wrote historical plays such as La jura en Santa Gadea, magic comedies such as Los polvos de la madre Celestina and a book of Fables. He joined the Royal Spanish Academy in 1847, directed the National Library of Spain from 1862 to 1875, and prepared careful editions of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón and Don Quixote.